Disney’s Culture, Then & Now

In today’s second “On the Square” article, associate editor Mary Ellen Kelly reflects on Disney’s Christian Past and Tangled Present . Although the critic Armond White, writing in the December issue of First Things ,

is absolutely right about the tendency of today’s animated films ( Tangled included) to pander to the most annoying and depressing aspects of popular culture even as they ignore or deny the richer, deeper culture from which most classic fairy tales emerged, the animated features that Disney brought to the screen when Uncle Walt himself still oversaw the studio made a point of drawing considerable aesthetic, emotional, and narrative power from specifically Christian aspects of the culture that, even today, America shares with Europe.

She then provides an exposition of two earlier Disney classics, Fantasia and S leeping Beauty , and reveals their dramatic Christianity.